Quality New Mexico The Story of Malcolm Baldrige & QNM | Page 3

Sandia’s
director
of
Quality
Management, Charles Tapp, was on his
way to briefings at AT&T headquarters
in New Jersey, in effect launching the
lab’s new quality program.
New Mexico’s quality initiative gained
momentum in September, 1991, after
Chris Galvin, Bob’s son and then
Motorola’s Assistant Chief Operating
Officer, made a germinal off the cuff
speech to a group of business leaders at
Las Cruces, N.M., at the invitation of
Sen. Jeff Bingaman. Mac Baldrige had
died four years earlier, and the
Department of Commerce’s Baldrige
National Quality Program had since
been named in his honor. Galvin knew
about quality: it was his company’s main
weapon of defense against the onslaught
of new foreign competitors in the
international electronics markets. The
company, once criticized for poor
quality, had received the national
Baldrige Award. Now he was spreading
the success story.
“I had met [Chris] and his father, Bob,
and had been aware of the Six Sigma
initiative they had developed at
Motorola,” Bingaman told me. “The
larger agenda was to help New Mexico
businesses create and grow jobs. I had
also gotten acquainted with Malcolm
Baldrige during his time as Secretary of
Commerce and had been impressed with
his efforts to promote quality
improvement in U.S. businesses. This
was the period during which U.S.
companies were very focused on the

competition
Japan.” 3

from

Asia,

especially

In short, Galvin’s Las Cruces speech
made a powerful case for quality
initiatives, discussing Motorola’s Six
Sigma quality and the Baldrige Award,
ultimately challenging New Mexico to
be the first to be able to put on its license
plates: “New Mexico = The Quality
State.” 4 A good way to start this journey,
he said, would be to visit Motorola
University in Schaumburg, Illinois, to
learn what Motorola was doing to
promote improved performance in all
parts of his corporation. For many of his
listeners this sounded like an opportunity
too good to miss.
Meanwhile,
Sandia
National
Laboratories was planning to offer its
expertise in quality matters to the state
at large as a public service, and its
unclassified technical expertise as a
service to industry. Sandia Executive
Vice President C. Paul Robinson, who
was Charles’s supervisor, had been
particularly disturbed by Japan’s leap
forward in the automotive market. The
U.S. was not producing what its
longtime customers wanted, he said,
and “We believed America should
wake up.” The management of U.S.
industry also needed streamlining.
“Bureaucracy is like entropy, always
increasing. We want to knock it back,”
he told me. “The quality method is the
only remedy I know that will counter
3
4

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, email message, June 1, 2015
Chris Galvin, email message, May 31, 2015

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